On "Concentration Camps"

So even if you live under a rock as I earnestly endeavor to do these days, you'll likely have seen the brouhaha about AOC and her concentration camps comment. Then the hand waving of "no they aren't!" and then the jumping in of Mr. Sulu of "yes they are!" and it rapidly devolved into a Fiddler On The Roof-esque "It was a horse" "It was a mule" yelling match.

I have a few thoughts.

First and foremost, I'm so tired of everyone trying to compare everything they don't like and/or that is bad to Hitler and WWII. Hitler was evil. I think, by and large, the thinking portion of the world all agrees on that. But just because we don't like something or think it's bad doesn't necessarily qualify it for evil on the scale of something Hitler would do. So could we all just stop with the Hitler crap? Because honestly, it diminishes the travesty of his evil to have stupid stuff compared to it.

Next up - how the camps for illegals differ from concentration camps in WWII. (And yes, that's a necessary distinction. Wait a moment and see.)

When someone today says "concentration camp" they are purposefully eliciting a mental picture of the horror and travesty of WWII internment camps. The places where Jews were forcibly shunted to for the sole purpose of torturing and killing them. There is no other meaning to the words "concentration camp" today. History has taken the phrase and branded it, if you will. So if you use that term, that's what you're saying.

So the folks who want to chime in that "Oh sure they are, because a concentration of illegals is being held there, so semantically it is a concentration camp." Just no. You can't semantic your way out of it.

So, the difference?

The people at the border came here voluntarily with the intent to illegally enter the country for the sole purpose of living here illegally and getting aid and funding. If they don't like the conditions at said camps I am reasonably sure they can find someone and say, "I would like to return to my home country and resume my citizenship there." And we would show them the border and say "Have a nice trip home."

We didn't round anyone up. We are not holding them there against their will (in so far as if they want to leave the US they are free to do so. If their will is to continue to illegally enter the country then okay, yes, we are holding them against their will because their will is illegal.) If people don't want to be in these camps, there is a legal process of immigration that they could have chosen to follow. (Yes, it's hard. Yes, it's probably broken. That doesn't mean you get to decide to just ignore it. There are a lot of hard, inconvenient, and/or broken laws. You know what? You still have to obey them.)

Oh but what about refugees? Well, there's a legal process for that, too. And yes I get it, it's not maybe as fast as sneaking through a tunnel in the middle of the night and disappearing into the community, but you're going to piss off a lot less of the population of the country by dealing with the legal process than if you ignore it.

Compare to Hitler's concentration camps. Could the Jews leave? No. Not unless they wanted to be shot. Were they there voluntarily? Again no.

So really, A+ for rhetoric and word pictures. Because "concentration camp" is evocative. But I'm going to go with a D- for truth.